We’re in business. Literally

March 11, 2011 – 1:34 pm

As mentioned in a previous blog post, gitorious.com is getting some new content. We’re launching the new gitorious.com today, and we’re really excited about it.

Gitorious started out as Johan Sørensen scratching his own itch almost four years ago. After steadily getting more users and projects on board, Gitorious grew into a business in 2009 when our friends at Nokia helped us provide some great new features – and Shortcut AS took on the responsibility of running Gitorious as a business. Starting January 2011, gitorious.org and the development of Gitorious as a project is done by the separate entity Gitorious AS, employing two full time employees.

Today, we (as in Gitorious AS) are announcing some new commercial offerings we think will both facilitate the continued success of gitorious.org and help companies use Gitorious internally. Our new web site provides more information about our offerings, so please have a look!

Gitorious.org will continue being free for FOSS projects. This is also the main reason we have no current plans of offering support for private projects on gitorious.org.

Companies and organizations who want to support us in offering this service for free to the free software community should consider our subdomain offering, which is a way to sponsor gitorious.org. For companies using or considering using Gitorious internally, our local install offering includes the services required to make this as painless as possible. Please note that we will keep working on simplifying the installation process of Gitorious, like we did when we added the Bundler library to our software stack.

Finally, we’d like to thank you all for helping Gitorious become the success it has become. There are tens of thousands of users using Gitorious every day, and exciting new projects turn up on gitorious.org all the time. We’re thrilled to have the oppurtunity of improving the service and keep adding features that makes life easier for FOSS developers.

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Another update on the Sony issue

February 24, 2011 – 9:26 am

Yesterday we received a letter from Sony’s attourneys asking us to disable access to a list of projects hosted on gitorious.org. The letter claims that the repositories in question provide circumvention of effective protection mechanisms built into Sony’s PlayStation 3, which would be illegal according to Norwegian law. Furthermore, Gitorious would be subject to direct liability under Norwegian Copyright law if we were to provide access to content that is unlawful under Norwegian law. By not taking action when notified of content that may be in violation of the law, we could be charged with gross negligence – which would mean that we are no longer protected by “ehandelsloven”s regulations for service providers such as Gitorious.

This leaves us with no other options than to comply with Sony’s demands and take down the content.

We are by no means comfortable with the situation, and would love to see Sony’s claims tried in a Norwegian court; especially taking into account the fact that the Norwegian Consumer Council finds Sony’s removal of the “Other OS” feature from the PS 3 to be in violation of Norwegian consumer law. However this is not a fight we’re in a position to take.

In consequence, we have disabled access to the projects listed in Sony’s letter, and have notified the owners of these repositories of this. We replied to Sony’s attourneys with the following email:

Thank you for your email of February 22, 2011.

In order to not be subject to direct liability under the Norwegian Copyright Act, we have disabled access to the projects listed in your letter.

Due to your short notice, we have not been able to investigate the legality of the projects in question. We kindly ask that you provide more detailed information about how you feel the source code repositories violate the Norwegian Copyright Act.

Such information should include:
- the URL of any repository that is claimed to be unlawful

- file names and line numbers of files that are unlawful

- a description of how the algorithms/functions in the above mentioned files/line numbers circumvent effective technological protection measures

This information will give the users who have published the source code on gitorious.org the opportunity to change their source code so that it no longer violates Norwegian law.

Kind regards,

Marius Mathiesen, Gitorious AS

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (26)

Gitorious moves Gem management to Bundler

February 17, 2011 – 7:34 am

In two weeks, on March 4th, we will merge a branch into Gitorious master that requires your attention if you’re running Gitorious locally and intend to keep it up to date. This is also a notice to all of you who have installation guides out there (thanks a lot!) to update them once the change is pulled.

Here’s the branch in question.

The branch moves Gitorious to Bundler for RubyGems management. This means that installing and updating Gitorious will be a lot simpler, and the sandbox provided by Bundler should also make it more reliant as external gems (such as the i18n) should not be able to disturb Gitorious.

Bundler hooks into Gitorious’ bootloader, and so from the moment you pull this change, Gitorious will not run until you’ve installed Bundler and ran it with Gitorious. But don’t worry, it’s really easy:


$ git pull origin master
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install

Once the Bundler branch is in master, this is in fact the only commands you need to install all of Gitorious’ gem dependencies. If you want to get started right away, you can pull from my clone and do this setup now:


$ gem install bundler
$ git checkout -b bundler
$ git pull git@gitorious.org:~cjohansen/gitorious/cjohansens-mainline.git\
refs/heads/bundler
$ bundle install

And you should be back up. We’ve run Gitorious with Bundler internally for two weeks with no problems, and we’ll be deploying gitorious.org with it tomorrow.

I’ll also be updating and migrating my install guide to the official Gitorious wiki.

Note that GItorious still bundles a few Ruby gems in vendor/. I made a pass at unvendoring them, but most of them are patched (usually for Ruby 1.9 support), so I dropped it for now. When we move to Rails 3 later this year we will unvendor all of these and use stock versions of the gems through Bundler.

This is only the first step in making Gitorious easier to set up and deploy, ultimately we hope to make Gitorious a quick and brainless deployment. We hope you like it.

By Christian Johansen | Posted in Code | Comments (3)

An update on the Sony DMCA issue

February 3, 2011 – 9:47 am

We have just sent an email to Sony’s legal attournes in reply to their DMCA takedown notice sent to us yesterday:

Re: Demand for removal of claimed copyright infringing content from Gitorious.org

This is in reply to your notification of United States Copyright Law Violations at Listed URLs, dated February 1st 2011. As we confirmed via email yesterday, the content was taken down from gitorious.org yesterday at 3.18PM CET.

Your claim made reference to US law, which is not applicable in Norway. When removing the content from our server placed in Norway, we did so to avoid being in violation with Norwegian law, to the degree that Norwegian and US copyright law is compatible.

However, it is unreasonable, and in conflict with basic legal principles, to assume someone as guilty until proven innocent. Allowing any third party to demand the removal of content on gitorious.org based on unproven claims of copyright infringement would assume any gitorious.org user would need to prove his innoncence under Norwegian law. This is unacceptable to us.

Our Infringement Notice Policy (http://en.gitorious.org/infringement_policy/) requires any Infringement Notice to include:

- An identification of the intellectual property right claimed to have  been infringed

Since your letter of yesterday contained no reference to Norwegian law we kindly ask that you prove that the content is in fact in violation of  Norwegian law. We will not act on further Infringement Notices related to this content until SCEA provides a Norwegian court order that deems the content in question as being in violation of Norwegian law.

Gitorious wants to make it absolutely clear that we have no agenda relating to the repositories in question. Our initial response to this notice was motivated by the fact that Gitorious could possibly be held accountable for not responding should this content be deemed illegal (with reference to “Ehandelsloven” §18). We object deeply to any violation of the basic legal principle of being innocent until proven guilty. This is why we have passed the ball back to Sony.

We hope you understand that it is not in Gitorious’, or the majority of its users’, best interest to pick this fight. We don’t have the resources nor necessary domain knowledge to assess the legality of all of our projects, which is why we have terms of service that state that users carry this responsibility.

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (32)

Gitorious receives DMCA takedown notice from Sony

February 2, 2011 – 1:41 pm

This morning Gitorious received a DMCA takedown notice from Sony. The notice addressed quite a few repositories on gitorious.org that are hosting various PS3 related code. Norwegian law commands us to respond to such notices by removing potentially copyright infringing content until it’s legality can be fully clarified.

For that reason, some of you have just now had your repositories removed from Gitorious – you should also have received an email explaining why.

Please note that the takedown notice also calls for Gitorious to disclose identities and private data about the users in question. According to our attorney we are not required under Norwegian law to provide such information, and will not comply to this part of the notice.

By Christian Johansen | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (39)

Update to Gitorious’ terms of service and privacy policy

January 31, 2011 – 12:26 pm

We’re posting this short notice that the Gitorious Terms of Service have been updated today, to reflect the fact that gitorious.org is now run by Gitorious AS, a subsidiary of Shortcut AS.

The changes are basically a find-replace of occurences of the Shortcut AS company name to Gitorious AS.

The documents that have changed are:

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Gitorious.com will “go away”

January 31, 2011 – 12:14 pm

For some time, our web server has been configured to present gitorious.org to you even if you access through gitorious.com (no redirect, it “just works”). As Gitorious is now a company with its own employees, we will be re-purposing gitorious.com. In one week from now, on February 7th, gitorious.com will be home to our commercial offering, and will no longer work as a proxy for gitorious.org. This also goes for git traffic, which unfortunately works through gitorious.com today.

According to our logs this should not affect many of you, but if it does please update your bookmarks and so on. We’re sorry for any convenience.

*.gitorious.org will of course be completely unaffected by this change.

By Christian Johansen | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

DNS update

January 13, 2011 – 6:52 am

Just before Christmas, we had a DNS issue that made Gitorious unavailable for about an hour. In the post about that issue we mentioned that we would be changing our DNS provider, a process that was just completed this morning. DNS is a fairly self-sustaining system, so the change should not affect you in any way. But should you experience any issues related to this, please drop us a note – either in the comments below, to our Identi.ca/Twitter account or our support email.

Also, we silently launched our new status site yesterday at status.gitorious.org which shows the current state of the Gitorious services. We’ll inform of any service interruptions on that site.

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Versioning Gitorious

January 10, 2011 – 2:05 pm

As a service to users with Gitorious installed on their own server(s), we’ll be giving Gitorious a version number. We’re aiming at cutting releases on a semi-regular schedule (like once a month). Hopefully, this will make it easier to know if and how to upgrade your instance. We will provide a changelog that summarizes new features and bug fixes, and use a versioning  scheme that says something about the extent of the upgrade.

Versioning scheme

We have not yet decided on the exact form of the versioning scheme, but here’s the general idea (thanks for good suggestions, chrashanddie). The version number will be four digits: Product.Major.Minor.Bugfix. We’ll start at 1.0.0.0. Here’s the intended meaning of each digit:

Bugfix

Obviously, bugfixes. Should be a no-brainer to apply.

Minor

Minor changes should apply cleanly simply by pulling it into an existing Gitorious setup. As such it may not require any configuration changes to preserve existing functionality.

Minor changes may include new features or minor changes/improvements to existing features. In some cases a feature may require changes/additions to configuration in order to apply.

Major

Major changes may or may not apply cleanly without configuration changes. Major changes may also require changes to the database.

A major upgrade may substantially change existing features, introduce new ones that are in some way incompatible with existing functionality, and may even remove existing functionality.

Product

This number will stay at 1 for the foreseeable future. It will change if we ever decide to significantly change the heart and soul of Gitorious.

Release schedule

As soon as the versioning scheme is landed and documented, we will cut the 1.0.0.0 release (or similar). Changes after that will be recorded in a changelog and released according to said scheme. We will keep gitorious.org on rolling deployment, so there may be several gitorious.org deployments per each release. Releases will be cut whenever they make sense, but as I said, we’ll aim at releasing something every month.

Feedback?

We need your feedback on this. Is this a good idea? A bad one? Any input on the versioning scheme? Let us know what you think!

By Christian Johansen | Posted in Code | Comments (10)

Gitorious is microblogging!

January 3, 2011 – 9:27 am

First of all: a happy new year to you all! As we mentioned right before Christmas, we have some great plans for 2011, and we look forward to a great year.

Our first baby step in the new year is to start using microblogging to keep in touch with you. You’ll find Gitorious on Identi.ca and Twitter. We’ll be using these services to inform of new features and service interruptions. See you there!

By Marius Mathiesen | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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